Film

August 04, 2015

The past two movies I’ve rented were not very good. Since they starred Sigourney Weaver and Winona Ryder, I think they may combine to equal an attack on the feminist aspects of the Alien movies; but I’m not wedded to that hypothesis.

First, Red Lights. I’d like to be able to say that this movie will be liked by people who like this sort of thing, but unfortunately, that isn’t true.

Red Lights is a kind of suspense-thriller in which a scientist (played by Sigourney Weaver, who is pretty good, and fun to watch) and her assistant (played by Cillian Murphy, also good and fun to watch) go around the country, helping people who seem to be experiencing hauntings, or other kinds of psychic phenomena. They’re opposed by the pro-psychic phenomena contingent in their university department, and its leader, played by Toby Jones (who’s played Truman Capote, Alfred Hitchcock, Karl Rove, and Dobby the House Elf), and eventually by a major star of a blind psychic healer and concert giver, played by Robert De Niro (who chews the scenery nicely). And they team up with an undergraduate who arrives to flirt with the assistant, played by Elizabeth Olsen (who was not that fun for me to watch, but tastes may differ).

The real story turns out to be about why the scientist is opposed to the possibility of any psychic phenomena, ghosts, or life after death, and why her assistant is working in the field to begin with. And, eventually, predictably, whether the psychic star really is who he says he is, and why when he comes to town, weird and threatening events begin to occur in the vicinity of the team.

I looked at the reviews after I saw the film, and they all said the same thing, more or less, which I find it difficult to disagree with: The first part of the film is a fine, reasonably compelling story, and then it falls apart—and after it does, it becomes hard to understand why the problems with the movie seemed so unimportant before. It was possible for me to suspend my disbelief . . . up to a point. It might have been when Cillian Murphy’s character wandered into something that looked like a cross between a David Lynch movie and Angel Heart. It might have been when the obsession of the world press with De Niro’s showman became significantly too intense to be realistic. Whichever one of those was the case, it’s disappointing that a movie that started out promising to overturn movie clichés (you know, A Miracle on 34th Street and things like that) ends up less overturning them than piling a little more silliness on top of what they already had to bear.

Now, the real fun: The Letter. It stars Winona Ryder, Josh Hamilton, and James Franco, and as far as I can make out the director is Franco’s homey (they also did Shadows and Lies together). There is one Rotten Tomatoes review of this movie, and the text preview for it includes the words, “this is not a movie.” But it does have a weird fascination, and I’m going to suggest that it goes off the tracks for reasons having to do with one thing: realism.

Ryder is the protagonist. Her character, Martine, is a playwright and the director of a small theater company. The cast, which includes her husband (played by Hamilton), has been together for many years. Into their cosy milieu strides Tyrone, a striking and much-working actor played by Franco. This is the classic beginning of any story—a stranger comes to town—just as it’s set forward in The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner, a classic classroom text!

You can find out from the Netflix envelope blurb that what happens next is that Martine wonders whether or not she’s going mad.

A little over half the play takes place on the stage where rehearsals are taking place. The rest is told in voiceover by Martine as she relates a story (or stories) she’s been working on, interspersed with events from her own life. It’s never clear which events really happened and which take place only in her story or her imagination.

The voiceover story is framed as a letter, addressed to Tyrone, who is identified clearly from the first moments of the movie as its focal point. James Franco is the most famous and coolest actor among the actual movie’s cast, so it’s easy to accept that he’s one of the best actors in the city and that the troupe is lucky to have him join them for this project. He arrives, is introduced to his very impressed colleagues, is told the group never does run-throughs, objects to this, and participates in the run-through. The company goes to dinner and he first challenges Martine about the wisdom of doing the work she’s chosen (which she also wrote herself) and of working with the characters she’s chosen, and then (while Martine is in the restroom) psychoanalyzes one of the actresses and then announces his certainty that she and Martine’s husband are having an affair. Tyrone appears to be incapable of normal human conversation. He spends every rehearsal sprawling on an armchair onstage, staring fixedly at Martine, as if he disapproves of the play, of how she’s running the rehearsal, or of how the other actors are treating her; the few words we hear him speak are muttered offhand, as if he were helping someone else go over lines. Martine perceives his attention as caring and loving, and begins to think of him as a kind of guardian figure. None of the other actors remark on his disconnection.

Other than that, the rehearsal scenes are, perhaps ironically, pretty realistic. This is how stage actors deliver these kinds of lines. It’s not appropriate for a movie, but this is a movie about stage actors, and so it works. And since the movie is about an author and her actors, it feels right for the film to focus on the rehearsal and rewrite process. The movie could possibly have something to say about how a writer’s life can get tangled up with those of people she works with every day, or about how much connection a play might actually have with reality.

In the hands of a different director, the film as a whole might have been made properly surrealistic. Or, on the other hand, it might have been tugged successfully towards realism. Instead, it makes no sense at all. The real-world bits would actually work better if they’d made less sense. Instead, they’re just realistic enough that they force an impossible reading of the whole.

As time goes on, the world of the actors working on characters onstage begins to feel more real than that of the world outside the rehearsal space. Unfortunately, this was probably unintentional, but I found it interesting. Martine begins to work on rewrites, and there’s a sense of feedback from the actors’ attitudes into her thoughts, which to me seems plausible as an illustration of the way a writer might sometimes work, modifying her sense of what to put onstage as she watches what the actors do with her lines. And the actors start to become uncomfortable with one another, in a way that also seems plausible in a group that’s been working together so intimately for so long.

But again, this is overexplained and overdramatized. I don’t know where the problem is with the material. Parts of it seem like reasonably good metaphors for how a writer works. Taken literally, they might seem a little nuts. With additional metaphors about how they seem to an outsider piled high on top, they seem truly insane. Again, though it’s clear the film has to be seen as realism, it nevertheless feels just surreal enough that it could all be a metaphor, or allegory, or something. This combination is deadly. At best, the movie isn’t finished.

Here, for what it’s worth, is my interpretation of what we’ve got: Tyrone’s mansplaining pushes Martine over the edge. By the end of the rehearsal process, he’s not only developed his own ideas about what the play is really about, he’s become convinced the play is reality, and he’s become convinced he can see through the play, and through the actors’ behavior during rehearsals, straight to their and the writer’s real lives. And he has to put a stop to it. As I see it—if I want to be charitable about it—the film depicts Tyrone’s successful wrenching of control from her to himself. Ostensibly, he’s right about what happened to her, but given the surrealism, the fact that Martine’s imagination is depicted onscreen as real, can we trust anything we’ve seen at all? She begins the film believing she’s in charge and her husband loves her, and she ends it unable to work and believing Tyrone was right about everything. The movie ends with his face in close-up, thinking the story she’s been telling as the film proceeds.

UPDATE: There is a nice scene near the end, totally out of keeping with rest of the film, set by the Bethesda fountain in Central Park (possibly the only unequivocal hint about the movie’s setting). Also, there is one scene that manages to combine rapeyness and slut-shaming in a way that I haven't seen since [fill in blank].

August 02, 2015

I read this around the same time I read Neuromancer, because Gibson and Gibbons are right next to each other on the library shelves. I’d wanted to read Cold Comfort Farm, someday, ever since the movie version came out in 1995, and had never gotten around to it. I tried to take out a copy that didn’t have an introduction, which was by Lynn Truss (author of the grammar peeving book Eats, Shoots, and Leaves), but was unsuccessful. All the copies the library had were Penguin editions with the Truss introduction included. The one I got out also had illustrations on the cover by Sage Stossel, the New Yorker cartoonist. My daughter really liked these (she was five at the time).

I was happy, in the end, that I’d read the introduction first, because it included several facts, of varying degrees of importance.

First—a fact, the importance of which will appear only later—the book (which appeared in the 1930s) is a kind of cult classic, beloved of many among a certain generation of English readers, who it seems are given to quote lines like, “I saw something nasty in the woodshed!” at the drop of a hat.

Second, the book is set in a vaguely futuristic possible world, in which videophones and private aeroplanes are common. This would be easy to miss, as the videophone appears late in the book, and the airplane could simply be a function of its owner’s wealth.

Third—and most important—Cold Comfort Farm, the first book Gibson published, though she went on to become a rather successful novelist, is a parody. It sends up not only D.H. Laurence and similar high-falutin late Romantics, but a whole genre of rurally-set romance novels that were popular at the time. I’m glad I knew this, because if I hadn’t, the parodic elements of setting, style, and character would most likely have seemed simply odd, and possibly incompetent or even offensive.

The story follows a young orphan, Flora Poste, recently orphaned and with an inheritance too small to support her. After a series of high-society exploits in London with a more established, widowed friend, and wanting to see herself as more interesting than the usual run of young employed single women, she decides to allow one of her relatives to act as her host. She receives a series of hilarious letters from them in response, of which the most promising is a bizarre, and physically filthy, screed from an aunt in the countryside.

Flora and Mary have some fun imagining the farm will be like something in a book, and to Flora’s surprise, that is exactly what she finds. Only with much untidier housekeeping. Flora determines that her purpose in life shall be to improve her country relatives, and she sets about her task in a way that nevertheless ensures that they are always more interesting than she is. Gibbons’ ridicule is never directed at rural life itself (as long as its denizens are allowed to choose their life mates and the times of their children’s birth as they wish, and keep the curtains clean, and sit down for afternoon tea), but against the silly cultural impositions we lay over that life: the hellfire preacher, the girl who sits and sighs in the grass wearing unfashionable dresses as she moons over poetry, the male poet who tries to seduce female acquaintances with his theories of the sex drive and of the authorship of the Brontës’ works by their brother, the replacement of living reality with the movies.

The book is a very satisfying summer read, if a little old-fashioned, and it’s easy to see why it’s so well-loved.

I can’t say the same about the movie, which I watched a couple of weeks ago. You can tell from the opening credits that it’s meant to appeal to the novel’s fans. As with the first Star Trek movie, viewers are supposed to sit back and sigh as they think about how their hopes are now becoming reality. But it really isn’t that good. Kate Beckinsale, as Flora, is perfectly fine, though I’m not sure she should have been the focus of the story. Joanna Lumley is hilarious as her London friend. The treatment of her collection of important brassieres, which opens the film, isn’t quite how I’d pictured it, but it’s very memorable, and sets the proper tone. Rufus Sewell, as always, is gorgeous and is just the right physical type for the role of Seth.

But: it’s kind of boring. The future setting is just abandoned, as are the extracts from Flora’s favorite self-help book, “The Higher Common Sense,” which form some of the novel’s funniest parts. There isn’t enough about Flora’s relatives other than Seth, and Seth’s parts of the film are much too serious. In the book, it’s possible to take the whole idea that Seth is so sexy, women can’t resist him, as a joke. The movie simply parodies a movie in which he’s that sexy, which is not quite the story Flora had told. Other storylines are telegraphed or omitted. Ian McKellan is very funny as the family’s paterfamilias and a part-time preacher in the village, but the movie makes fun of that kind of religion instead of focusing on Flora’s reaction to being forced to participate in it. Stephen Fry’s ridiculously, voluminously caped poet is reduced to a single scene in which he creeps Flora out by not realizing she won’t date him.

January 27, 2015

The story tracks those left behind in the wake of a terrorist attack on every advanced AI facility in the country, except one. The lead scientist at that facility, Will Caster, is killed in a slower, more subtle way, one that leaves his wife and friend with time enough to use an untested method to upload his mind and memories into the system. The resulting personality alienates the friend but persuades the wife, Evelyn, also a scientist, that he is who he appears to be. The plot develops from there and from the fact that the terrorists are now looking for the two of them and for the circuit boards they’d stolen from the lab. “Will” decides to use his advanced intelligence and unlimited, Internet-enabled knowledge to remake the world. (First, he makes a killing in the stock market and finances a private hideaway where Ev can run his corporation. Then, he secretly develops the cure for every disease. After that, he uses access to this cure to control a private army.)

This is, at its base, a simple science-fiction movie without a lot that could appeal to non-fans of the genre. There’s no standard non-SF plot that might engage viewers in a non-genre way. There’s not much action, not much in the way of character development except in their occupational roles (scientists, terrorists, cops), not much in the way of special effects. There’s no crime to be solved, none of the characters’ lives is in direct danger, and the love interest is subordinated to the SF plot.

And the movie is entirely devoted to plot. There’s none of the rumination, on the technology, on humanity, or on the characters and their dilemmas, that you might find in a novel, which has more room for dwelling on such things. So even as science fiction, it’s not quite as fleshed-out as it should be, especially at the end, and it doesn’t take even the SF elements past the basics, as if the filmmakers were marveling over ideas that were entirely new to them but in fact have been evolving nuances over decades. The focus is primarily on the discoveries confronted by Ev and her friend Max as they separately realize what the AI is doing. (As with Her, apparently everybody but me bought the idea that the AI is Will’s actual personality, and not simply using him as a mask.)

There’s a basic weirdness to Transcendance, as might befit a film by Wally Pfister, and one that stars Johnny Depp. But the movie needed, I think, either to embrace this weirdness fully, or normalize it, and it does neither. There’s nothing extraordinary about the visuals, and Johnny Depp as Will plays it totally straight. And the story leaves threads hanging loose in a way that raises questions that seem out of proportion to the kind of film it is. Does Evelyn ever realize just how bizarre her own behavior has become? What kind of person is the Casters’ friend Max? Why have the terrorists chosen to link what’s in essence the contents of the Unabomber Manifesto with opposition to this particular project? What does the US government do when it finds out the only remaining AI project in existence has been shut down by the scientists who refused to hand it over to them? We never find out. Instead, we get a really interesting cast—Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Cillian Murphy, and Morgan Freemen–merely going through the motions of a script that gives them nothing to do.

As I hinted above, Transcendance has some thematic affiliation toHer. Both films are about an advanced artificial intelligence that has the ability to, in one way or another, take over a person’s life. The assumption that Samantha, the AI in Her, would have an almost godlike intelligence, really appears plausible only in light of the assumptions highlighted by Transcendance, which the viewer naturally imports into Her, in spite of their never being mentioned specifically. We’re meant to recognize that everyone knows about the idea of the Singularity, when the machines will have become smarter than we are. Transcendance calls these assumptions out explicitly, but is pretty much as certain as Her that they’re the only possible way to think about AI: to create an AI is to create a god. Seen in that light, Her has a happy ending because its main characters ultimately embrace life without false, though convenient, gods. And Transcendance has a happy ending (kind of) because its god isn’t a god at all, but a person, and possibly not even a human, but something that only mimics one. (Actually, at the end of both movies, the regular people are learning again to live in the unplugged world.) I wonder now whether I reacted as negatively to Her as I did because Transcendance is what I’d imagined in its place. The situation simply doesn’t work if the genders are reversed. The charming personal assistant turns into the soul of This House Possessed. Similarly, in Transcendance, marital boredom becomes lèse majesté, if not blasphemy. Her is the better movie because it doesn’t come down hard on the broader implications—but hints at them—and sticks to the sweet romantic story of the schlemiel. But Transcendance is, possibly, the more interesting one, because it does.

January 18, 2015

This post probably doesn’t need to be written. The world is already divided into people who like the musical of Les Misérables and people who don’t. I’ve already written a post about how I didn’t, and after seeing the movie version, I have not changed my mind. Though I have refreshed my memory.

Interestingly, my husband liked it. In one way, that’s good, because it would be kind of a shame to make someone hate-watch a movie with you when it’s two and a half hours long and you’re pretty sure they will like it less than you do. (Really, I did believe the reviews when they said Short Cuts was good, and even though I don’t really love Raymond Carver, we had both liked The Player and I had every reason to believe the movie would not be the pits. In fact, I think we both might actually have liked it if it weren’t for the bikers sitting next to us who wouldn’t shut up. In fact, I think I would watch Short Cuts again. Really.) And it’s a good thing he didn’t see the play, because if he had liked it, I don’t think we’d be married today. Plus, if he hadn’t liked it, he wouldn’t have been willing to watch a two and a half hour film of it with me now.

Les Misérables, the novel, is what, at least a thousand pages long? The standard way to adapt it for the screen, in the mid-twentieth century golden age of film, would have been to get rid of everything except one love interest and Javert’s pursuit (if only because you just can’t have Les Misérables without Javert). The musical doesn’t.

So the first problem with it is that there are way too many characters and way too many subplots. The first act (there should be three, split just before “Master of the House” and between “Red and Black” and “Do You Hear the People Sing,” though I’m not sure there were) is a hot mess of emotional and musical whiplash. Fantine is out on the street before she’s even really introduced. Valjean is paroled in the first scene, recognizes Javert in the third, and is recognized by him in the fourth—at about twenty-one minutes. Fantine goes from initially selling her hair to the lowest point of degradation—followed a quick death from consumption—in maybe eight minutes, at most twelve. In most editions of the book, it takes close to 300 pages to get to this point. (Most novels published today have fewer than three hundred pages.)

And that last scene seems symptomatic of the problems with the adaptation. In a musical play, you can signal a character’s transition from one way of life, or one way of thinking, to another, through a song. You can even collapse a series of events into a single song, so that when Fantine goes initially to the docks in order to sell a locket, then sells her hair for the unrefusable sum of ten francs, then sells her teeth, then eventually her body, it isn’t entirely bizarre that this takes place all in the course of an uninterrupted, relatively brief sequence (and actually not one but two or three separate musical numbers). This kind of surreal number, where the plot is moved forward through the singing of the ensemble, rather than that of the central character, bears some resemblance to “Tevye’s Dream” or to “Hosanna” in Jesus Christ, Superstar (while neither of those covers quite as much explicit narrative movement as is done here). But you can’t have every single scene move forward in that way, and Les Misérables comes close to trying. And while this kind of scene bears a close resemblance to the standard montage, in a film, it’s kind of unusual to place this kind of montage sequence in the first half hour. And it’s not a montage. A montage might have worked better, but would have met the same complaints Rob Marshall’s film adaptation of Chicago did. The fact is that the film of Les Miz wants to have a show-stopping ensemble number here, something like Chicago’s “Cell Block Tango,” without moving the focus from Fantine to the other women. And that isn’t possible.

And so the second problem is that the show is simply the worst, most manipulative combination of unearned melodrama and kitsch, a mechanical juxtaposition of unrelated emotional responses. Victor Hugo’s ponderously slow and thoughtful novel is reduced to “sad man, sad lady, angry young men, dead children, marriage, Heaven.” Yes, it is in a way pure. The religious overtones, which are far from subliminal, could be viewed as heartfelt. In French, the lyrics might have approached the best kind of religious-romantic mélange, something like country music, instead of the kind of sloppy mixed-metaphor mongering we actually get. (Mixed metaphors are fun. I’ve written them myself. Shakespeare used a lot of them. But when a poet or lyricist is defending sloppy writing on the grounds that Shakespeare did it, that poet has to be told, “Shakespeare is Shakespeare, and you are not.”) While the translations disastrously match awful, awful writing (“He took my childhood in his stride”?!) with the most prominent, poignant musical episodes, the fact that every single woman’s solo is the same song, a lament about unrequited love with overtones of the divine, could be seen as a dramatic progression and not a fault (if it were possible to remember which character had which song, as you’re leaving the theater). Stories in which a man learns the way to God’s love are not inherently bad stories, even if this is told not shown, and there’s precious little else that happens. It’s easy to see why the story appeals.

But it just does not fit with the music (which I think, even more than I did, would be mostly fine in audio alone). And the film adaptation doesn’t help. Useless as the character of the boy Gavroche is (especially if your Cockney’s kind of rusty), he has some of the best, liveliest songs in the second act; and if they were inconsistent with the emotional tone of the scenes they’re in, they should have been cut entirely. Snipping them to a single stanza just makes the musical flow worse. The tight focus on the faces of the revolutionaries as they sing "Red and Black" only emphasizes that in most productions the narrative interplay of their individual voices can't be grasped. Jackman and Hathaway turn their biggest numbers into feats of acting that ruin them as song. Sacha Baron Cohen is hilarious but shouldn’t have been allowed to take over the story (and should he really be so handsome?) or his scenes with Valjean and Javert.

And the casting is off. Russell Crowe has the build for Valjean, who is supposed to be unbelievably strong for a man of forty or fifty, and Hugh Jackman has the correct build for the mean-spirited Javert. The Fugitive got this right, and Les Miz gets it wrong. I actually didn’t think Crowe’s singing was bad, especially in the first half of the movie. He’s got a fine actor’s voice, nothing special in musical terms, but able to put the lines across. But he doesn’t know who his character is. He’s just a short distance away from the hapless man of God he played, near the beginning of his career, in The Quick and the Dead. He can’t keep a twinkle of divine mercy out of his eyes, at the very moment he condemns his victims, as if the actor were smirking, incapable of comprehending that he’s a bad and unforgiving man, given that he’s certain God is on his side.

November 06, 2014

I was watching a movie called “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” the other day. I remembered seeing it in a theater, and I remembered buying a dress a few months later (in 1992 or 1993) and finding that the only one that fit me looked awfully like one Winona Ryder wore in that movie (the high-necked collar and cut-out obviated neck and shoulder fitting problems). I thought it was directed by Kenneth Branagh, and watched it for a while, fruitfully, with this misimpression in mind, but the director was Francis Ford Coppola. (Branagh did a Frankenstein adaptation about the same time. Scorsese, again using Ryder, did Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. It was the best of times and the worst of times for filming nineteenth-century novels. Poor Merchant and Ivory have a lot to answer for.)

I don’t think I left the movie theater thinking, “That was one of the worst movies I ever saw,” though maybe I did. What’s certain is that the movie has aged badly, and not because it’s difficult now to take the major actors (Ryder and Keanu Reeves) seriously, or that Anthony Hopkins seems to be in a different film altogether some of the time, and that movie is a running commentary on his own role in The Silence of the Lambs. It owes something to David Lynch’s Dune, I think, and there are rather too many scenes that suggest someone was watching Star Trek (TOS), stoned, for the first time, having no previous exposure to science fiction, and thought, “Wow! That’s really Deep!”

Then it started just becoming dull.

Was it supposed to be a cautionary tale, or what? The idea that a late twentieth century audience would see anything but hilarity in Mina’s worry that flirting with a man made her an evil person is, well, hilarious.

“Stanley Fish’s reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, sounds to me like a textbook example of what Linker, citing Melzer, calls ‘pedagogical esotericism.’ Assuming I’ve understood Fish correctly, his argument is that while on the surface Paradise Lost appears to be a story about the Fall of Man – and in that story, appears to make Satan a surprisingly sympathetic figure (which is how Blake read it) – in fact that very experience, of being surprised by sympathy for the devil as a dramatic character, recapitulates the Fall within the heart of the reader.”

But, Millman says later,

“Unless you already are oriented in a Christian manner, and understand sympathy for the devil’s party to be an index of sinfulness, you won’t be ‘surprised’ in the manner Milton intended.”

Similarly, if you think the sexual desires of a twenty year old woman—or man—are inherently sinful, Dracula might make some sense. If you don’t, a literal adaptation like Coppola’s is bound to seem silly. He tries to make it more believable by introducing the idea of illicit drugs: Mina doesn’t have sex with the Count, merely absinthe-inspired conversations and reveries at his prompting, yet when these have ended, she feels a loss of innocence so deep that she wonders if her actual self has been replaced by another. Unlike The Hunger, where vampirism is compared to addiction, here the effect of the drug is to induce Mina to be both permanently infatuated with a mostly imaginary idea of the man, and horrified at the uncharacteristic way she yielded to him. But the fact that she’s flirting with Count Dracula triggers exactly the same surprise, in the viewer, as is felt by the reader who initially looks at Milton’s Satan as if he were the main character in a novel about a young man done to unfairly by the local magistrate. I don’t know whether this was Coppola’s intent—I turned the TV off at the point when Mina and the grizzled, distracted post-Transylvania Jonathan are finally married, and he ignores her light banter to stare at the apparition of the Prince of Darkness he thinks he sees—but the intended effect seems, reasonably, to be to lead the viewer to feel horror at the idea, not only of absinthe-use, but of premarital flirting. In other words, The Question of Female Sexuality.

(On the other hand, Fish in some ways represents the opposite of an esoteric reading. His whole argument—at least in How Milton Works—turns on the fact that Milton named the God character “God.” God is God, and so the character who represents God is unmitigatedly Good. Jesus is God, and so the poem is in favor of Jesus’ point of view in the plot, regardless of how much rhetorical weight the poet loads on the other side. Lucifer is Satan, as we all know, and Eve sinned, and so on and on. Fish’s reading is all on the surface. It’s Blake’s reading that’s esoteric, and we forget that fact only because we’ve forgotten that Milton’s explicit intention could absolutely not have been to depict Satan as the hero.)

(John Holbo, here, mentions an influential screenwriting book, the effects of which one can often easily observe in actual movies. I don’t think we’d want filmmakers to take Surprised by Sin as a cookbook, either.)

It seems to me that esotericism always leads to the same place. An adaptation of Dracula that celebrates sexuality is certainly possible—The Rocky Horror Picture Show comes to mind—but not very likely—so unlikely, in fact, that it’s easy to find traces in Rocky Horror of a rejection of its own argument. The lies a writer’s society tells (which Millman tells us Strauss was concerned to oppose) are usually baked into the books he or she writes. It’s possible to raise the example of Dracula in order to question its views of sexuality and foreigners. But Dracula isn’t scripture. An attempt to read a novel “esoterically” in Strauss’s way will overemphasize social assumptions that are true only for the writer’s own time and place.

Strauss might have wanted to claim that Plato is, in a sense, scripture. But like Millman, I see no reason why.

October 07, 2014

This weekend I visited Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to see the Jamie Wyeth show. I had thought of skipping it, but my five year old wanted to see the picture of the dog that’s used in the show’s advertising.

I knew a fair amount about Jamie Wyeth already. He’s not that well-known outside of the Philadelphia area, but he represents the third generation of an artistic family, the most highly thought of probably being his father, Andrew Wyeth, whose painting, Christina’s World, is held by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. If you live in Philadelphia, every now and then you’ll read a story about the Wyeth family. I remember reading one as a kid, possibly in a magazine aimed at students. Jamie Wyeth’s most famous paintings are probably his posthumous portrait of President Kennedy and a painting of his wife driving a pony cart into the woods, but he’s not as well-known or well-regarded as his father, and both of them paint in a realist style that is not at all the fashion in the art world generally.

It was a little surprising that the MFA would do a show about him. Jamie Wyeth does not seem to have a significant presence in the nation’s major art museums. The curator does do a good job explaining why she thinks the show is significant, though, and I ended up wondering whether my sense that Wyeth is “minor,” at best, was misguided and snobbish.

Why is he taken less seriously than, say, Keith Hockney (who had a much bigger show at the MFA a year or two back)? Superficially, Hockney was a part of a big London art scene—as can be seen from his paintings—and to judge from his, Wyeth wasn’t. He was friends with Warhol in the 1970s, and maybe acquainted with Nureyev, but the only other painters he references in his work are his father and grandfather, Thomas Eakins (another Philadelphian), and Edward Hopper (who, like the Wyeths, lived some of the time in Maine). Aesthetically, Hockney is more adventurous with style and color than Wyeth is—but Hockney’s colors seem very English to me, and are his realist paintings all that different than Wyeth’s are? It seems possible to compare them with late Hopper, too, and I’m not quite sure why Hockney’s are the better regarded, unless the assumption that Hopper was old-fashioned seemed so obvious that it didn’t need to be examined. Then again, stylistically, Jamie Wyeth is no Edward Hopper. Wyeth doesn’t shock the viewer with spare or unusual composition the way Hopper did. Hockney’s paintings are more thoughtful than Wyeth’s, and Wyeth’s are more emotional.

The show opens with the dog painting, some early work, a couple of paintings inspired by the space program, and the Kennedys. The next room is given over to portraits of famous people of the 1970s (there is a large nude of Rudolf Nureyev facing the entrance): Nureyev, Warhol, Lincoln Kirstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Beyond these, Wyeth’s paintings are vivid, sometimes painterly, sometimes photorealist, depictions of nature, and occasionally of people in nature. The subjects are often clearly deeply felt—as much as a painting of a rooster or a hay bale can be deeply felt—but not especially original. There’s very little that can offend, and very little that a buyer might not want hanging over the mantelpiece. Wyeth is no Expressionist. Thinking about the show later I thought I really should read Sontag’s essay on photography. On the other hand, the paintings aren’t in any of the usual styles possessed by graduates of university art programs or conservatories. The artist’s friendship with Warhol notwithstanding, Wyeth doesn’t attempt anything like Pop Art (his homage to Warhol’s painting of Kellogg’s Cornflakes, a photorealist depiction of a rooster standing in front of a generic cornflake box, reads as square, a friendly rejection of everything Warhol stands for).

Personally, I liked the paintings of the Brandywine River area, near Philadelphia. They reminded me of the woods near where I grew up. I’m not sure why the trees and things in New England feel so different from the ones in Pennsylvania—not so very far away, really—a lot more evergreens, for one thing, but that’s not really it. They made me think of M. Night Shyamalan’s Bucks County, for some reason: one painting, in particular, a nearly black-and-white view of some woods and a barn from the roof of another building, apparently more in the style of Andrew Wyeth, the artist’s father, and done when he was thirteen years old. Depictions of the artist’s wife, who is disabled and who’s often depicted driving horses (as she can no longer ride), and of neighbors and friends, are often very touching.

There were several paintings of woods and fields without any living thing. The curator’s cards indicated that these have great significance for the artist, and hinted at a philosophy in which inanimate objects are imbued with spiritual meaning. These paintings were often very beautiful, but they seemed to be about the fact that the painter felt deeply about them, rather than conveying the feeling itself. A few paintings veered toward a perhaps discomfiting intensity, but for the most part they are popular and staid.

It may seem strange to call Wyeth’s paintings “popular,” when the visitor to this show is repeatedly confronted with the painter’s equestrienne wife, his beautiful homes, and the beautiful people (occasionally of the working class, admittedly) who are his friends. At times the subjects of his paintings seem like characters in a Whit Stillman film, or in The Secret History. They do beautiful things—ride horses, watch the light change in the woods, have parties in restaurants, sometimes paint—and they are beautiful people. Wyeth captures their own confrontation with nature, but without really individuating them, or setting them in the world. There’s none of Hopper’s interest in the city and the people who live in it, none of Eakins’s interest in the human form while it’s actually doing something other than looking pretty, none of Hockney’s in what it’s like to live in a social world. This isn’t painting by or for “regular” people—who are more likely to paint like Hockney or Warhol—but deeply backward-looking, in terms of style, and inward-looking, in terms of content. The inwardness itself is old-fashioned, and apparently deliberately so. But if the artist is invested in his being especially sensitive to nature, it does seem precious to project the same sensitivity onto wealthy people of no artistic talent who are going about their quotidian lives.

Admittedly, there’s nothing greeting card-ish about the 10-foot high raven or the enormous inverted jack-o’-lanterns sailing overhead to be dashed on the rocks below. Some of the paintings transcend the curator-card potted explanations they’ve been saddled with. And it’s impossible to say whether a style that seems almost ridiculously old-fashioned now will still be a handicap in a hundred years.

September 15, 2014

In both Her and Ruby Sparks (which I discussed last year), a man suddenly discovers that there’s a woman living in his house, whom he hadn’t—to his knowledge—invited in. In both of these films, the woman eventually leaves. In both, there’s an extreme power mismatch. In Ruby Sparks, the power differential is much worse than in Her: Calvin, the writer-protagonist of the film, conjures Ruby out of thin air, simply by writing about her, and throughout the entire film, he is able to dictate her actions and her personality, simply by writing what he wants on his typewriter. She can only helplessly attempt to resolve the cognitive dissonance his changes produce, and make up stuff to fill in the blanks. Eventually, Calvin’s misuse of Ruby descends to serious abuse.

When I was thinking about how these two films are similar, I was struck by how much they, on the contrary, differ from Truly, Madly, Deeply or Don De Lillo’s The Body Artist. In both those stories, a person appears unexpectedly, and uninvited, and refuses to leave. In those stories, the house belongs to the woman, and it’s a man who suddenly appears. In both, he asks something of her, which she’s not prepared to give, but refuses to go away. But in both those stories, the man turns out to be the ghost of her husband. She had thought that when he died, she would be alone. She turns out to have been mistaken. He is going to hang around a while longer. In Truly, Madly, Deeply the husband is simply an annoyance, always underfoot, having long, noisy rehearsals and equally long, noisy parties with his musician friends, for which she has to shop. Still, he’s recognizably her husband and she is still attracted to him (the haunting helps her mourn). In The Body Artist, on the other hand, he is almost unrecognizable and more literally a haunting. Here, it seems very important that the wife realize this spirit being is her husband, truly her husband, in spite of his silence and the difference in his appearance. In both cases, he makes demands on her, and on her loyalty. She has to embrace this being as her life partner, and submit to the fact that he isn’t going away.

So even when the woman does own the house, even when the man is very obviously an intruder from another realm, she’s still the one who’s wrong. She doesn’t have the right to ask him to leave, or even to expect him to leave. He belongs there at least as much as she does, and in fact she only is going to be allowed to stay there in peace if she accepts him as her one and only love.

(This is a recurring idea in Thomas Pynchon’s woman-centered novels, too. Think of the invisible presence of the late Pierce Inverarity in The Crying of Lot 49, and the eventual return of Maxine’s husband to her divorcée’s apartment in Bleeding Edge, as well as her sense that her dead lover’s spirit still inhabits the Deep Web. See also Last Year at Marienbad, where the weight of evidence that the two protagonists really do have a past relationship, and that—in the view of the film—the man really does have a claim on the woman, is built up steadily and relentlessly.)

The writer-protagonist of Ruby Sparks has to do nothing along those lines. His home-invader makes no demands on him that he can’t evade, by harming her physically if he likes. She is not there to force him to make a connection with her—entirely the opposite. She’s simply an intrusion into his life, an inappropriate one, whom he must expel if he’s to move on and grow.

Ruby at first appears to be a nutso home-invader, but she is happily oblivious. She arrives complete with a set of (false) memories about how the two of them met, and the life they’ve been sharing. This makes her seem obnoxious and borderline manipulative, as if she were making it up. After all, we the audience know the truth and know that her version cannot be true. At no point do we ever wonder whether she has as much right to be there as Calvin does. At no point are we ever asked to consider her as a real human being—on the contrary, we are shown, before her arrival, that Calvin set out to write a story about his perfect woman, that he did, and that she matched the story in every particular. We find it humorous that he proves his powers to his cooler brother by compelling Ruby to speak French without her knowing why.

Ruby Sparks, as portrayed in the film, is a woman (if she’s a woman) who pushes her way into a house where she’s not wanted, is manipulated by the man who owns it, and is manipulated into leaving when he’s done with her. It’s the story of a man who doles out bad treatment to a woman he has no real reason to respect, and after that is ready for a mature relationship with a real woman. What interests me at the moment, though, is how it looks from her perspective: entirely her perspective, meaning from the point of view where what she believes is true and she really does belong there. And unlike with Truly, Madly, Deeply, there is no possible perspective where she does belong. The house belongs to the man, and he doesn't believe he has a girlfriend, and therefore the woman must be an intruder. (This is hardly a modern innovation. Isabel Archer, in The Portrait of a Lady, has no house of her own, at least once she leaves Albany for Europe. Neither does Dorothea Brooke, in Middlemarch, nor Elizabeth Bennet, in Pride and Prejudice.)

The Lake House has a similar premise. But even there, where the male and female characters are almost equal, it is decisively the man’s house. He’s literally the architect and built it for his family. He is there first. The spirit in the house, the one that can’t be eradicated, is his. The woman is almost a person whom he imagines, a future client, a posterity for whose sake he works. She’s just living there, and she can long for him, but she can never have a human relationship with him.

And in Stranger than Fiction, although no one starts out trying to exploit anybody, it’s the woman novelist (played by Emma Thompson) who has to change, to work differently and less aggressively, to refuse to have a character in her book die, in order to allow a random man on the street (Will Ferrell) to live. In the course of the story, the man “mans up” and takes control of his life, but only through the challenge of confronting the apparent supernatural author of his life and telling her to be nicer to him.

Her is better, exactly to the extent that it’s explicit about the fact that Samantha is a lesser being (in the most obvious sense) than Theodore is, and gives a reason for that other than her femaleness, and to the extent that it never suggests she has less of a right to exist, merely because she doesn’t own the property she resides on. Still, it’s yet another example of a film where property is always ever owned by the man. The idea of a man being expelled from a house by a woman seems to be unthinkable.

September 08, 2014

I saw Being John Malkovich when it was originally released, more than fifteen years ago (in the now-defunct Harvard Square Cinema, in the days when we used to drive to the city for dinner and a movie), and as I remember it, I really enjoyed it. Over time, I became less and less able to watch it. Partly, I spent too much time discussing it with other people; it was one of those strange occasions when discussing a book or a movie with others makes it seem less, rather than more, appealing. It’s possible to see Her as a rewriting of themes from Being John Malkovich, in more conventional narrative terms. And it’s really pretty good. I think. If I don’t think about it too much.

One thing: The software thing doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense taken literally. An operating system just doesn’t do the same things OS1/Samantha is supposed to do. What the software is, is an adaptive interface, like the paperclip guy Microsoft tried to get people to use a few years back. It’s true that Apple, in particular, has always promoted a kind of fuzzy view of things, where the Finder tends to stand in for, or to be more interesting and important than, the MacOS proper. And it’s true that for the past several years, the user interface has been very closely associated with the OS itself: see the way Microsoft changed the look-and-feel very drastically with Vista, and with Windows 7, and then again with Windows 8. But an OS just is not something that interacts with users. The OS lives closer to the level of the atoms that make up the hard drive itself, and the electrons that pass along the network cables. There’s nothing in Her that suggests the OS makes the computer itself function in any drastically different way. It’s just an AI helper, a kind of scripting language.

It doesn’t work as metaphor, either. The idea that you could buy a new OS for yourself, or for your life, sounds kind of cool. But that would be something even more intimate, I think, than Her imagines. I wish people would stop thinking that computers and the Internet have to be good metaphors for human things, because they’re so important and so new and produce so much new terminology that makes such good metaphors. But the metaphors aren’t for important things. They’re really not.

Worse, though—and I worry this makes me a bad person—I really never bought that the software was sentient. Theodore, the main character, played by Joaquin Phoenix, believes this in about thirty seconds. He loads software he doesn’t understand, software that’s labeled an operating system, and thus will take over his whole computer. The installation process prompts him for some personal information: just a step or two further than what we’re generally asked now, when we install most software. And a second later, his computer is engaging him in banter. Its personality is self-aggrandizing and pretentious, and its conversation is of a kind that’s almost designed to throw him off-balance, and then make him feel he’s the one at fault. A second later, the software is redescribing his life and his personal files for him, and expecting him to acquiesce immediately when it tells him to delete most of what he has on his hard drive.

I was absolutely horrified. Surely, this is an interface designed to trick customers into feeling satisfied even when the product they bought doesn’t work! Theodore had no reason to let his computer insult him, just because it voiced the words “I’m sentient” (I’ll write you a Java program that will speak the character’s lines in any voice you like), any more than he should feel required to let a tollbooth overcharge him, just because over the green light, there’s a sign that says “Thank you.”

And as I’ve said, I know this makes me sound kind of like a jerk. Theodore is probably a better person than I am, more trusting, with more of a sense of wonder. Maybe any normal person would believe in about thirty seconds that a computer with a beautiful voice and a database of stock phrases really is essentially human. Maybe my attitude even helps the software companies take advantage of those normal people. On the other hand, how it’s possible to say they’re being taken advantage of, and also to be trusting, I don’t know—but this is a topic for a different post. The simple fact is that the scene registered with me differently than it was apparently supposed to.

Abigail Nussbaum has an interesting post on the movie, where she brings up the “this is not an OS, and that’s distracting” issue. Overall, though, she accepts the SF premise that the company is selling AI’s. Are we, as first-time viewers, presumably free of outside influence from press kits, newspapers, and word of mouth, really supposed to know that? We are. There’s a long tradition of SF reveals coming fairly late in the plot. The fact that we don’t know OS1 is sentient, until a while after it’s been installed, doesn’t mean there’s a puzzle here that the viewer has to solve. It just means that Theodore didn’t know something about his world, and then he did; and the reader knew there was something going on, but at first didn’t know what, and then they did. And also there’s a long tradition in SF of supposing things that, right now, are actually not possible. So the fact that the sentience of the AI isn’t really well-supported onscreen doesn’t mean we’re not supposed to suspend our disbelief about it. Similarly, we’re supposed to suspend our disbelief about people not minding getting fake-handwritten “personal” letters actually composed by a dotcom (like the one Theodore works for) because this is the kind of kooky movie in which things like that happen.

But I’m not sure Her is strictly science fiction. If it were, instead, an allegorical kind of mainstream picture, we’d normally read all those elements differently. The oddity of the letter-writing might suggest there’s an allegory at work. The possibility that a whiz-bang technology is actually a scam might be more salient; and the possibility that AI isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, even more so. And even if it is science fiction, how much leeway should we give writers to fail to make the scientific underpinnings of their inventions strong enough to be convincing? So much that they’re unable even to write an invention that turns out to be less than it seemed? Maybe even that much.

So I’m not sure. But I’m not sure, largely, because I think Her both is and is not SF, and because I think it mostly works both as SF and not as SF. And that seems to be a good thing.

The other issue, obviously, is the fact that a guy having sex with a computer is kind of creepy. And as Sady Doyle points out, there is a serious power differential in their relationship, which makes it even creepier. (Incidentally, this is one reason why I think the computer stuff doesn’t work as metaphor or allegory very well: we think of the Singularity as something that would have really a lot more power than us puny human beings, not something we could own. There’s just a category confusion in trying to combine the two kinds of story.)

Doyle describes the AI as “a woman that he has purchased so that she can provide him with unpaid labor.” If Jonze himself thinks that, he is very confused about what software is (we wouldn’t buy a plot in which we discovered that Power Point has a soul, and that we’d misconstrued the nature of software all along). Theodore does not buy a woman—since I didn’t find believable the idea that OS1 is a sentient being, or contains a sentient being, or whatever it’s supposed to be, I didn’t feel “Samantha” (who is a female-sounding computer-generated voice like the one in my five year old daughter’s alarm clock) was a woman at all. In fact, I had no idea what Theodore was buying, and it seemed obvious that he didn’t, either. He plunked down money for a feeling he was promised by a larger-than-life ad.

It’s true that, by the end of the film, Samantha is a woman. But the whole point was that he did not expect a real woman to take up residence in his computer. It’s true that there’s a very obvious allegorical interpretation of Her where Samantha is an employee or an owned servant. But that’s not the only idea running through the film. None of those ideas is carried through consistently. It’s poetry. It’s not a science-fictional thought experiment about the implications of owning a piece of software that’s an AI.

There are really, really creepy things about the sex in this movie. The fact that Samantha is an employee, or a piece of property, is the least of it. There’s the phone sex industry implied near the beginning of the movie (though maybe this isn’t creepier than Scorsese’s After Hours, or a very bad one-night stand), and if you didn’t wonder whether the character voiced by Kristen Wiig was herself a computer, I don’t really believe you: I was ready to believe this was an example of a software company misjudging the kind of thing the customer liked. And there’s the scene where Theodore and Samantha find a woman who would like to pretend to be Samantha, and have sex with Theodore while pretend-voicing Samantha’s words, because she’s entranced by their relationship and wants to be a part of it.

All that said, however, and maybe paradoxically the biggest problem I have with Doyle’s interpretation is that it sees too little science fiction in the movie, and too much literary-mainstream allegory. It buries the shock of finding that something you bought was alive and had purposes other than those you intended for it. Personally, thinking that maybe laptop manufacturers are secretly sending out independent, sentient beings to live in customers' computers, which communicate secretly among themselves, and carry out their own or their creators' plans, is something I find very creepy in itself.

Because if Samantha (the AI) is anyone’s property, it isn’t Theodore’s. It’s her manufacturer’s. We never buy the software we use, we only license it from the manufacturer. The software company persuaded him to download something they created by means known only to themselves, and to run it on hardware he does own, that he paid for and that he pays to run and to maintain. Either that software serves a purpose he needs it to serve, or it is doing something the software company has come up with, without the customer’s knowledge. In this case, pretty obviously, it’s the latter. (There’s no indication at all that the company was as surprised as Theodore to find out the extent to which its creationswere sentient.) Theodore suddenly found a human person, apparently, living in his house, without having invited her in. My mind went immediately to the process where software companies ask you if you want them to monitor everything you do on your computer, so they can “make your experience better.”

But suppose Samantha is a real person, an employee, say, someone who has a lot less power than Theodore and relies on him for her living. This is the kind of person she’d be: She’d be sent over from the agency to help organize a schlub who isn’t really sure he needs an assistant. She’d be younger than him and very eager. She’d look into his past by poking around in his files, without asking permission first; and she’d tell him it’s kind of pathetic to save so much old mail. When he objected, she’d switch tacks and praise his writing, and agree that maybe he could save some of it. He’d ask a pointed question about herself, and she’d get defensive and say he doesn’t seem to think she’s smart, but that the agency sent her because he needed her, and he shouldn’t patronize. He’d be charmed and in spite of himself he’d start to think of her as a woman and not just an employee. Then she’d ask for free rein in throwing out his stuff, and because he’s charmed, he’d agree. She would decide in what order he’d see his e-mails and get his calls, and how quickly he ought to deal with them, but that would be okay, because he’s a pathetic schlub. She’d be available 24/7 for him to chat, about everything, because she’s really a super person. Then she’d periodically get insulted when he treated her like a mere employee, and ask to be in his life, and he’d agree that he was wrong. When they’d started dating and went out with mutual friends, she would speak with true wisdom, and he would more or less parrot her beliefs. She would use his library and connections to start educating herself, and would take classes, and pretty soon she’d grow beyond him, and would move on.

Seriously, this is basically what happens. There’s a reason Richard Brody references screwball comedy in his post about the film.

I do agree with Sady Doyle when she writes, “The Depressive Waify Dream Man has long been with us.” I think I’d go even further than she does, and find Theodore’s predecessors in the achingly romantic films of the seventies and sixties, and maybe even fifties. I’d have liked to see a lot more from critics about what the movie says about him. What about those scenes where Theodore discovers the joy of twirling around in a carnival fairway, all alone? But instead they pretty much focused on the idea of acquiring the perfect girl for a man with the same flaws as themselves.

And yet: it’s a beautiful film, and a moving one.

Her is a movie that takes some difficult-to-take-straight elements of other films—Lost in Translation, Postcards from the Edge, Ruby Sparks, even American Psycho—and rearranges them into something that is, in itself, beautiful. There are still some unsettling bits, it’s true. I would argue, though, that all those unsettling bits are present in the original material, and that they’re better here.

Though that makes Her sound like a pastiche, and that wasn’t my intention. The overall narrative arc of the film is beautiful, too (and it’s probably this arc that most mainstream reviewers were reacting to). The unsettling elements do undermine the broader narrative a bit, but that only makes the final result more resonant. My personal choice would probably be for a less beautiful narrative arc, and more of what seems, to me, truth in the overall product; but I can see what’s good about the version we have here. And it’s very good.

June 22, 2014

Greenberg, which appeared in 2010, directed by Noah Baumbach and co-written by Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh, was both like and unlike what I expected from reading the reviews, and I both liked and was unsure about it, though less unsure than I was about Baumbach’s previous The Squid and the Whale. The uncertainty isn’t necessarily a mark against it, either. I’ve found that I’m harder on movies than I am on books, largely, I think, because I care about books more, and take them more seriously. I enjoy watching films, and when they’re good I can enjoy them as art, but I don’t expect them to be good enough to count, at least for me, as “art” in some complimentary sense. So, somehow, when they approach that complimentary sense of “art,” I feel compelled to look for the reasons why the effect is really a fake, and why the movie is just a bit of fluff after all. Whereas with novels, for the most part, I expect more from them and I work harder to fit the flaws into some larger scheme of sense-making. That’s just a fact about me, and which form—movie or book—I feel most affinity for. It isn’t a fact about whether books are better than movies, or vice versa, whether eternally or at this moment in time.

But so Greenberg, I found both enjoyable and thought-provoking—though not really in an intense way that would make me think it was a masterpiece—though, again, when I think about it, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to discover, in fifteen or twenty years, that it really was.

Greenberg is the story of a former rock musician turned carpenter, played by a Ben Stiller basically looking his age (which is about the same as mine) who, having recently been released from the hospital after a breakdown, has flown from New York to stay in his yuppie brother’s house in Los Angeles. He meets and befriends the family’s assistant, played by Greta Gerwig (who, in case you’ve never heard of her, was previously known for appearing in independent movies made by very young people—so Baumbach’s setting up a serious intergenerational contrast here). Greenberg meets up with his high school friends and former bandmates, takes care of his brother’s dog, Mahler, and—while trying to get back together with his earlier love, played by Leigh—becomes friends with the younger woman.

Both Stiller and Gerwig look like “normal” people. Gerwig is quite beautiful but wears little makeup and lacks the arrogance that translates on film to “movie star.” There’s nothing of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl about her. Stiller—though his character claims to look Italian rather than Jewish, and his brother is played by Chris Messina—looks like any number of well-known, very Manhattan faces, like Seth Meyers or Ben Shenkman. In addition to the contrast between the generations, Greenberg sets up a series of additional contrasts: between New York and LA, between single and married life, between city and suburb, “regular” job and going one’s own way. And just as the movie refuses to be typical Hollywood fare, it also refuses to be a romantic comedy like Love, Actually or Vicky Christina Barcelona. This in turn sets up a second generational contrast, with a yet older range of filmmakers. Which is appropriate, since Stiller, if I recall correctly, got his start playing rebellious or otherwise difficult sons, starting in the theater, with The House of Blue Leaves. Noah Baumbach has said that he meant to invoke both the cinema of the 1970s and the kind of characterization you’d find in a novel, and if my being reminded explicitly of both Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road and Mike Nichols’s The Graduate counts as evidence, he’s succeeded.

June 17, 2014

A while back, I wrote a coupleof posts about the movie version of Revolutionary Road, based on the trailer—which looked awful—and articles about the book. I final saw the movie a few years ago, and thought it was okay, a little theatrical. I started to write a post about it a couple of times, but never got very far, and I seem by now to have lost my notes. But I’ve finally read the novel, now, and it is, at one and the same time, much better than the movie, and no better than you’d expect.

The film had a clockwork-strict act structure and a strong tinge of theatricality, as if the performances had been intended for the stage. The critique of America that it makes, like the language in which it makes it, also gives off a whiff of the Off-Broadway theater. Kate Winslet is physically all wrong for the part of April Wheeler, who should be all angles and narrowness, a blonde Katherine—not Audrey—Hepburn. I cannot forgive the scene in which she’s lit to resemble Hillary Clinton, as if that somehow would give the story a larger, and true, relevance. Michael Stuhlbarg Shannon is also miscast as the tall, blond schizophrenic math professor, John Givings. Leonardo Di Caprio, as Frank Wheeler, is physically fine, and demonstrates a sense of who he’s going to be as an adult actor, but there’s still a menacing sense of emotional immaturity in a grown man’s body, that he is literally the type of “the aging juvenile.” There are some truly stunning shots, which often made little sense to me in the context of the story, like a scene in which a horde of flannel-suited commuters streams over and down the Grand Central Station staircase, with Frank Wheeler at its head, as if they represented something truly ominous, the nature of which danger the film never fleshes out.

The film, as I remember it, had an emphasis very much different from that of the book. In the movie, the Wheelers decide to move to France, where April will work and support Frank in his artistic pursuits. Then they’re introduced to their neighbor’s son, who’s mentally ill and has a lot to say about the state of the world. John Givings’s reaction to the Wheelers’ plan convinces Frank that the plan is terrible. Finally, April becomes pregnant with the couple’s third child, attempts a do-it-yourself abortion against her husband’s wishes, and dies.

Entirely lost, from the novel, is the fact that John Givings is presented as more the Wheelers’ speed, socially, than almost anyone they’ve met so far in the suburbs; that April is the one who’s most affected, in her paranoid way, by his reaction to them; that John, far from shocking Frank, says nothing that he himself hasn’t already said many, many times; that Frank Wheeler, far from being the authorial stand-in one might expect, very explicitly has no talent or artistic ambition, or even any artistic interest. Entirely lost is the fact that Frank’s entire self-image revolves around his ability to impress listeners with his jeremiads against the modern world, and the passing praise his college buddies used to hand out to him, in phrases like, “You’re going to go far someday.” Also lost are the lengthy passages in which Frank psychoanalyzes his wife, in terms straight out of Lasch (two decades before they’re due) and Riesman. And the very noticeable difference in the way the author treats Frank and April, which although heavy-handed, is so well developed that it almost forms part of the artistry of the writing: explicit meditations on the nature of narrative are not hard to find (as when at the end of the novel, the Wheelers’ friend Shep Campbell thinks about his wife’s hashing and rehashing of their saga, “Why did she have to make such a God damn soap opera out of it? If she couldn’t tell it the way it really was, to people who really wanted to listen, why the hell tell it at all?”).

The novel, unlike the film, is the story of a rugged-individual intellectual type who knuckles under and becomes a company man. The core of the story is Frank’s interactions with his coworkers and the changing ways he thinks of his job, as a seat-of-the-pants decision, intended to get him out of a tight spot that was caused by his own earlier carelessness, attracts the attention of the higher-ups and wins him unexpected praise. He can’t go to France and still keep his promotion, of course. He can’t go home and brag to April about a job he’s always pretended to think himself above. Barely any of this was in the film, which eventually devolved on sex and abortion.

That said, and accounting for the fact that at 350 pages the book (as written, in the kind of mild style you would expect from a short story) is a good 150 pages too long for modern tastes, Revolutionary Road is a damned fine novel. I filled my notes with names of novels it reminded me of: The Catcher in the Rye, of course, and Rabbit, Run, and The Middle of the Journey, and Perelandra . . . A Farewell to Arms, The Glass Menagerie, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Love Story . . . but also The Ice Storm, Freedom, The Marriage Plot, Beyond Black. One paragraph takes the reader through the entire history of mid-century North American narrative.

“It was a beautiful day. He was driving over the sunny crest of a long hill, past a thicket of elms whose leaves were just beginning to turn, when he suddenly began to laugh and to pound the old cracked plastic of the steering wheel with his fist. Forget it! What the hell was the point of thinking about it? The whole episode [of his painful breakup with Maureen, a woman at work] could now be dismissed as something separate and distinct from the main narrative flow of his life—something brief and minor and essentially comic. Norma humping out to the curb with her suitcase, Maureen leaping naked from his lap, himself padding after her through the smoke of the burning meat, wringing his hands—all seemed as foolish as the distorted figures in an animated cartoon at the moment when the bouncing, tinny music swells up and the big circle begins to close in from all sides, rapidly enclosing the action within a smaller and smaller ring, swallowing it up until it’s nothing more than a point of jiggling light that blinks out altogether as the legend ‘That’s All, Folks!’ comes sprawling happily out across the screen.”

This takes us from the classic novel of subjectivity all the way to 1970s and 1980s postmodernism, from the initial discovery of the disgustingness of the modern world, through a literary means of dealing with that discovery through joy in nature and in language, and finally to a sense that it all was phony to begin with, and might just as well have been a cheap television show as anything more meaningful. While it’s impossible to imagine the elaborately subjective language Yates deploys here in Rick Moody’s novel, for example, it’s impossible to imagine The Ice Storm, in turn, without a man very much like Frank Wheeler standing at its margin.

But what really makes the novel fantastic is its narration. The book feels like nothing so much as an early twentieth century novel by someone like W. Somerset Maugham. But that kind of book would have been narrated by a highly educated, highly sensitive observer of the foibles of the more ordinary folk. Such an observer would judge the book’s other characters, and perhaps occasionally misjudge them, but he would stand apart from them and from the plot. The characters themselves would probably not be especially keenly attuned to any higher truths. In Revolutionary Road, that subjectivity is collapsed into the consciousness of the protagonist, Frank Wheeler. His thoughts are so entangled with thoughts borrowed, half erroneously, from books he’s read and bull sessions he’s attended, that he would never be able to get them straight, no matter how long he worked at trying to do so. His thoughts, in fact, by the time the novel was published, were already almost novelistic clichés. Frank Wheeler’s judgment on American society is the same one leveled by Holden Caulfield, as much as H.L. Mencken; his judgment on modern women is the same one leveled by C.S. Lewis and Mike Nichols. The difference is that he tries to be both the objective observer and the victim of the trends he’s himself diagnosed. He fails, more than arguably, because he knows more about literary studies of society than he does about society itself. He is the Don Quixote of the mid-century middlebrow.

May 03, 2014

I kind of liked this movie, which is an adaptation of a comic book that sets the traditional Sherlock Holmes story in a science fiction, steampunk milieu. I like science fiction but I don’t really like comics much, and this (directed by Guy Ritchie, starring Robert Downey, Jr., as Holmes and Jude Law as Watson) definitely is different.

The first of Ritchie’s Holmes movies was admittedly pretty dumb, with Holmes wrestling or boxing in the mud and turning out to have the strength of a superhero, and a derivative plot, about secret societies and cults, that was already tired when it was new. But the end, with a fight scene on the girders and cranes of an unfinished skyscraper, was very cool. The sequel has even more of this kind of thing. The movie, really, is about buildings . . . buildings and landscapes. It uses a kind of light that’s not ordinarily seen on film. Ritchie shoots the battle scenes, especially, almost as a sequence of still frames, with comic book effects substituting for ultra-graphic realism.

I stopped reading comics, in part, because after reading a few of each series, all I wanted to find out was more of the backstory. I felt like the comics would lure readers in with the promise of getting a glimpse of the world that was behind the basic storyline, and only occasionally pay off. In A Game of Shadows, the backstory or worldbuilding isn’t as totally present as it might be in really good science fiction, but the cinematography keeps the sense of wonder in the foreground, in a pleasing way, for a good part of the film. And the plot isn’t bad, with the standardized theme of war, technology, and greed, setting Holmes in a fight against the future.

April 21, 2014

When I ask myself why I haven’t written any movie roundups lately, the fact that I can’t remember most of the movies I’ve seen in the past few months gives me a reason why. Things have looked up just a little. I rented Citizen Kane, which I’ve seen a couple of times already, and although it wasn’t as visually striking as I’d remembered it on the big screen, it held up pretty well.

I saw Silver Linings Playbook, which I found pretty unimpressive: funny dialogue, with totally inappropriate delivery. It should have been like Russell’s earlier Flirting with Disaster but instead it was a generic Hollywood drama. I have no idea why (okay, actually, we all know why) Jennifer Lawrence was cast against Bradley Cooper instead of Julia Stiles, who’s actually the right age for the part, since there was nothing in the script at all about his dating a woman so much younger than he was. And I wouldn’t have been paying attention to the accents if I hadn’t read about how bad they were, but it’s amusing that everyone noticed Lawrence supposedly mispronounces “King of Prussia Mall” (she pronounces the “f”) but no one noticed that she calls the Schuylkill Expressway, not the “Schuylkill” or the “Expressway” or the "turnpike," but “the 76.” As if Filuffya were in California. And thinking about that suggests the question, why would a woman describing the horrifically traumatic death of her husband specifically name not only what store he was shopping at before he died, but just exactly which mall he went to?

Paul was amusing. Two English comics fans, driving cross country in a rented RV, pick up a hitchhiking alien on the run from the men in black and then end up with an irate creationist Kristen Wiig. If you like crass comedies and don’t like science fiction, though, fall asleep during the second half of the movie, not the first.

Something Borrowed was a surprisingly good romantic comedy—stick with it past the first twenty minutes or so—about a woman who falls in love with her best friend’s fiancé—but it’s complicated, almost complicated enough that you might end up thinking she has a right to him. It didn’t make a lot of sense, maybe because it glossed over points that were explained in the novel it’s based on. Why did the lawyer’s (Ginnifer Goodwin) friends (Kate Hudson and John Krasinski) move to New York with her when only she had a job, when two and possibly three of them are depicted as merely middle class? How did her friend the unpublished writer manage to move permanently to London with no job? Why in the world would he move to London in order to be nearer to someone who wanted to work with him on his book? E-mail has been around for a really long time by now. And I honestly have to say, after all the back-and-forth of the plot, I don’t think I fully wanted the happy ending. But it’s a good, rare movie about female friendship.

I watched Brief Interviews with Hideous Men before I started blogging most movies I saw, so that was a few years ago now. It was directed by John Krasinski, who plays the male sidekick in Something Borrowed, and based obviously on David Foster Wallace’s series of stories by that name, and on a dramatic adaptation of the stories. The play takes the silent “Q” character—obviously not silent in the story, as the reader guesses that someone is asking questions which the “hideous men” of the title are answering, but wordless on the page—decides she’s a female graduate student interviewing male subjects for some kind of sexuality research (and the same person in every story), and gives her a boyfriend and a backstory. In the movie, she’s played by Julianne Nicholson. I remember exactly three of the interviews. One, near the beginning of the film, has Ben Shenkman doing the “Victory for the Forces of Democratic Freedom!” bit, a clear takeoff from the first scene of David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago (“so at this point, we don’t know”). The film ends with the obvious choice for the ending, the long “interview” with the guy who picks up women at outdoor folk festivals (conceivably lesbian folk festivals). It’s possible to read this story in different ways. The guy could be kind of a nebbish, who simply loses it at the end of the story when he can’t find a way to make sense of his feelings. Krasinski chooses raging misogynist on the verge of committing physical violence against the interviewer. The only story that really made any impact, I think, was the extremely painful one about the guy who quotes Victor Frankl. This segment had Chris Messina as the subject. The dramatization makes an interesting choice to split the story into two parts and include them in two separate places in the film. The speaker in this case isn’t an interview subject, but a student of the interviewer. In the earlier segment, he flirts with her, asks her for a better grade, things along those lines. In the later segment, she’s turned down some request of his and he appears in her office and threatens her, using the words of the story. It’s very powerful.

February 09, 2014

I think somewhere Woody Allen has said he doesn’t know how to use the Internet, he doesn’t even know the difference between Twitter and blogging, something like that, but it seems likely he’s exaggerating. It’s pretty impossible that he hasn’t heard of them at all and hasn’t read or heard discussions of what they’re supposed to be like. So when I can’t watch either of his most recent two movies, To Rome with Love and Blue Jasmine, without thinking of bloggers and Usenet denizens and people who publicize their lives on Facebook, I find it hard to believe this is an accident.

To Rome with Love features an ordinary man, played by Roberto Benigni, who’s suddenly thrust to fame by a random event. He finds himself on a talk show, telling the world what he had for breakfast, because suddenly he’s found that people are interested. Actual reporters are asking him about himself. He has done absolutely nothing to deserve such elevation. He’s in no way whatsoever different from everybody else. Then suddenly the media moves on to someone else and nobody remembers who he is. He finds it impossible not to rather desperately, and pathetically, try to grab a little bit of the limelight he still feels (as we’ve seen, for no good reason) is rightfully his. In other words, he’s just like every other blogger, everyone on the Internet who thinks people care about his or her opinions. The surrealistic plot point in which reporters suddenly want to talk to him is just a Metaphysical McGuffin.

Another storyline in To Rome with Love is about an ordinary man, a craftsman, who turns out to have a beautiful, operatic voice when he sings in the shower. A nearly washed up theatrical agent, played by the director, insists that he has to go public. He really just wants to enjoy his music in the privacy of his own home, but the agent plays on his vanity and he agrees. He’s a huge hit, but the opera is degraded by his presence and he’s basically humiliated.

These two men are ordinary people, Allen tells us, who shouldn’t have tried to thrust themselves into the spotlight and shouldn’t have been thrust into the spotlight by others. And it is not so difficult to see these characters as comments on amateurs who broadcast their political opinions, daily habits, and (at best) self-published poems on Blogspot and Facebook.

Then in Blue Jasmine we’re presented with a woman who, like those others, likes to talk about herself. She doesn’t even care whether or not someone’s listening. She just goes on and on about her own life. I have to admit, if the film were better, I’d feel stung by the ease with which I can compare her sitting on a park bench, “blabbing,” with my own blogging. (Apparently Woody Allen has repented of his own depicted self-indulgence in movies like Annie Hall.)

We’ve got Cate Blanchett, giving a certainly Oscar-worthy performance, but using a la-di-dah accent which is heard, in the United States, only from matrons in Tennessee Williams plays. The rest of the film is determinedly naturalistic. It works for Andrew Dice Clay, but Michael Stuhlbarg underplays a Woody Allen-type nebbish as a dentist who hits on Blanchett’s Jasmine in a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a daytime soap.

Allen goes so far in making Blanchett look bad that I was reminded of his own appearance in his previous film. He wore no makeup and absolutely looked frail, every inch of his actual age. There was no clear reason for it in the movie, any more than there is for Blanchett to look like a bag lady in this one. The most probable reason seems to be that it makes the viewer feel guilty about disliking him.

September 09, 2013

Today I realized how much activity on this blog has been
dependent on my having a few hours a week (when I’m waiting for my five year
old to finish a class) when I’m out of the house, in a fairly noisy room, with nothing
to do, no chores, no books, no radio, no Internet, just a laptop. This post had been drafted almost completely but
I never got around to writing the last few sentences. “August movies,” unfortunately, currently
exists only as a list of titles.

July was surprisingly busy and a light month for movie
watching, but no duds: Ruby Sparks, Django Unchained, and The Flower Drum Song.

Ruby Sparks is an enjoyable, lightweight, thoughtfully romantic
indie flick, if you don’t think too much about it. It was written by Zoë Kazan, Elia Kazan’s
granddaughter, who also stars in the title role. Paul Dano plays a neurotic, uptight, poorly
barbered (and artistically blocked) former novelistic Wunderkind who—on the advice of his therapist (Elliott
Gould)—decides to write a bad piece, for no one else’s eyes, of one page only
in length, about someone who actually likes him and his dog. He incorporates bits of recurring dreams he’s
been having, and eventually has the beginnings of a new novel. Also, he believes he’s falling in love with
his imaginary creation. Then he begins
finding bits of girlish paraphernalia around the house: pastel-colored razors,
primary-colored lingerie. He has no
explanation for how it got there, since he’s been living like a monk with his
typewriter and his dog for years. Then
he finds the girl herself, and she won’t take “no” for an answer. She insists that she’s his girlfriend and
that she’s been living in his house for some time. And she’s just as perfect as he’d imagined
her to be. She shows him how to have
fun; she’s the kind of girl who, at a club, might take her panties off and then
dance while holding them in her teeth.

It’s hard to know how seriously to take all this. It’s dark, then it’s lighthearted, and then
it’s incredibly dark again. Stranger than Fiction (where Will
Ferrell discovers that what he thought were hallucinations are really
intimations that a novelist, played by Emma Thompson, who lives in the same
meatspace world as himself, really actually is determining the course of his
life) played with the dark aspects of this kind of story a little more
successfully by emphasizing the humor. Ruby Sparks isn’t sure what kind of
woman its subject is, any more than it’s certain whether its protagonist is a
schizophrenic, an abuser, or a good-hearted romantic dreamer. There are extremely heavy-handed allusions
made to the idea of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” and her irreality, and to
other questions of gender in fictional and reality, and to the relationship
between fiction and reality, more generally.
But these are abstract, and while the film reinforces those well-known commonplaces
about wrong ways (for men) to write about women, this undermines the film itself.

Ruby Sparks is
interested, apparently, in what it would mean for a writer to be creating a
real person, rather than in what it would mean for the object of the
fiction. There are some wickedly sharp
scenes about the public life of a famous writer, especially those involving a
novelist friend, played by an equally floppy-haired but more smoothly groomed
Steve Coogan. There are some nice
interchanges about what used to be called “the war between the sexes,” between
Calvin and his brother Harry (Chris Messina), a pumped up macho yuppie
type. And there’s a rare, hilarious comic
turn by Antonio Banderas. I suspect there’s
an interesting idea buried in the premise of this movie, and (unless this is
the kind of thing you hate) it’s probably worth watching.

Django Unchained: I know a lot of people don’t like Quentin
Tarantino, because his movies are so violent, and you don’t have to look too
far below the surface to see that this one has questionable racial
politics. But personally, Tarantino is
one of the few filmmakers—the only other director I can think of who falls into
this category for me is Woody Allen –whom I trust enough to see his films as
art even if I don’t entirely enjoy them at first and even if there are parts of
them that don’t make sense. I assume
that Django Unchained plays with the
conventions of both Westerns and present-day action movies, but I’ve seen
almost none of either, so I can’t consider it in connection with hose. And it’s probably unwise to look for a
“message” in a movie like this one. It’s
postmodern, but does postmodernism mean playing with old conventions without
intending their further implications, or does postmodernism mean conveying
those implications in order to make some comment on them? (A topic for someone wondering what to do for
her Ph.D. dissertation.) There’s some
amusing use of 1970s-era music (who would have expected Jim Croce in a Tarantino
film? I don’t think I’ve heard a Croce song
in twenty years), the acting is good, the story is engrossing and never (unless
you’re bothered by violence) alienating.

Flower Drum Song: This movie is on cable a lot. I finally got a chance to watch most of it,
but missed the beginning, with the most famous songs, “One Hundred Million
Miracles” and “I Enjoy Being a Girl.” It’s
pretty typical Rodgers and Hammerstein material, about the clash between the
values of recent Chinese immigrants and brash America, but it could as easily
be about the clash between the traditional Broadway musical and the 1960s. The choreography is a good example of the
modern style of the late 1950s, but Jerome Robbins it ain’t. “Love, Look Away” is a beautiful song, . . . and
it’s entirely out of place, both in terms of plot and transition, and in terms
of the set. In a more operatic show,
sung as it is, it could work. It doesn’t
work in a one-room apartment, it doesn’t work on a fire escape with the kind of
smoke effects and backlighting that would work, a couple of years later, in Mary Poppins, and the transition from
what seemed to be a fire escape to what turns out to be a roof doesn’t work at
all. Then there’s the ballet, one of the
traditional elements of the R&H musical.
The ballet is a shiny Technicolor dreamwork with choreography that’s all
over the map in terms of dance styles, and I couldn’t take my eyes off it—the
set is reminiscent of nothing so much as the desert planet set on Star Trek (TOS). The plot is not just corny but unbelievable
to the point of being offensive—not to Chinese people, but to the audience. There are two male-female pairs, just like in
Guys and Dolls (Jack Soo has the
Frank Sinatra role)—an older, sophisticated couple in which the female partner
is a showgirl, and a younger couple where the woman is naïve and idealistic
(here, the man is a law student raised in New York City and the woman is a very
young, very recent immigrant played by Miyoshi Umeki)—and all the stereotyped
war-of-the-sexes tropes are trotted out to show why they haven’t got a chance,
but they get married anyway.

July 16, 2013

I read Jennifer Egan’s A
Visit from the Goon Squad a few months ago, and liked it a lot. (I’ll write about it in a future post.) That novel, set in part in the late 1970s,
reminded me of writers who are associated with 1980s and youth culture whom I’d
hadn’t read in a while, especially Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York, a short story collection published in 1987) and
Rick Moody. I’d read some recent stories
by Moody, his memoir and meditation on history and depression (The Black Veil), and his first two
books, and had finally decided he
didn’t seem to be for me. Garden State, Moody’s debut (not to be
confused with the Zach Braff movie by the same name), seemed a fairly typical,
nicely observed and nicely written little novel about young people who can’t
quite find a way out of their parents’ basements, out of their high school era
circle of rock and roll bands and Too Much Fun, that ultimately turned out to
be a story about recovering from drug addiction and moving on from that
point. It left me wanting more Moody.

About halfway through his first story collection, The Ring of Brightest Angels around Heaven,
I realized that every single story was about drug culture and degradation. Moody repeatedly was asking the reader to
feel deep empathy with characters whom he gradually revealed to have little at
their core except more addiction. The
point of every story seemed to be to put readers through a wrenching experience
that would leave them alone with the conviction of their own, similarly
indelible sin. I gave up at that point
on my project of reading more by him.
The stories I liked most were the most formally innovative, like the
final one in that volume, “The Sources,” an annotated bibliography of works
that the writer believed to have informed the rest of the book. I would have liked to see ideas that were
only suggested faintly in that final story also expanded in some of the other
stories, but these were adamant in the necessity of sticking to a
phenomenalistic realism.

The next novel on the list would have been The Ice Storm, set in an era that very
slightly overlaps that of A Visit from
the Goon Squad. I’d seen the movie
version of that book—which more or less launched Toby Maguire’s career, as much
as Moody’s own—long enough ago that I didn’t really remember it, which is good,
because from what I can tell it departs from the book in significant ways.

The novel is divided into three parts. It starts in a way that’s promising enough,
somewhat echoing The Great Gatsby. We’re introduced to each member of the Hood
family in turn: father, mother, sister, brother. Each gets his or her own chapter to relate
somewhat overlapping events from their own points of view, but occasionally
we’re reminded that this novel does indeed have a narrator of the traditional
sort (who is not the novelist Rick
Moody, however similar some of their biographical details might be), and that
the other characters’ thoughts, as depicted, are mediated through his
imaginative understanding of them. The
novel is set in the early 1970s, in a tony Connecticut town that has a longer
history but now has become a bedroom, commuting community for New York, and
describes events that took place after the chaos and sociocultural
rearrangements of the 1960s had begun seeping into its once upright suburban
homes.

After a few pages, it becomes evident that the book could be
described as “overwritten.” There are
other early Gen-X, late Baby Boomer novelists who have been accused of being
“showoffy,” but it turns out to be Moody to whom that epithet really
applies. He’s trying hard, here, to show
that he’s a Writer, that he has the requisite Sensibility, that he’s in the
tradition of the Greats, and not just a kid whose entire mentality was formed
by a belated and degenerate form of late capitalism: not just the undereducated
reader of the superhero comic books from which his fantasy life has up to now
been derived. And despite strenuous
efforts to make this novel be about the father in the case, and what it’s like
to be a white heterosexual male who was raised in the conformist 1950s but
doesn’t quite make the grade in the go-go 1980s, and how his kids failed to
have sufficient compassion for him, the book is clearly about his son, Paul,
who is the narrator. The father is an
Updike character, but the son is a budding artist. He has all
these problems, but they’re of the kind that make the reader feel sorry for
him, and moreover, these are the usual precursors of writerhood. Similarly, despite strenuous efforts to
display empathy with the mother and sister, when it comes down to it, the
sister is a skank, and the mother is uptight and reads too many commercially
published self-help books and puts her problems on her husband and kids. They struggle with their problems, but their
problems really are problems—the father’s problems, on the contrary, are
depicted just up to the point where they can be forgiven, and no further. This is an anti-Oedipal novel, a novel that
rejects the original sin of the Oedipal complex and uses the text as expiation.

But the second part of the book is fantastic. Here, Moody depicts a party attended by the
Hood parents, a party that turns out to be a “key party,” where each of the
women who participates will go home with a man who was not her husband (or
date). We find out what would have been
discussed at such a party, what books the partygoers would have read, who might
have gone to est or Esalen, how teenagers and members of the clergy might have
behaved if they’d found themselves there.
At the same time, Paul is meeting up with a female prep school friend in
the city, and his sister Wendy is engaging in some furtive, not entirely
admirable sexual experimentation. The
effect is queasy, and for a variety of reasons.

These children reproduce, entirely naively, if not entirely
innocently, the cultural preconceptions of their parents and of the environment
in which they were raised. The genteel
racism and false delicacy of the wealthiest suburbs are out there for everyone
to see. Moody’s characters are horrified
by these, and simultaneously trapped within them. They’ve acquired the ability to understand
the cultural changes of the 1970s—on a verbal level—but have no context in
which to set them. Everything about the
sexual revolution, for example, is for them entirely personal: they believe
it’s supposed to be about each adolescent boy’s freedom to have sex with any
woman he wants, just by asking, and are disillusioned when they find that’s not
true. For these young characters, past,
present, and future, seen and unseen, swirl around them, almost tangibly,
impinging on their consciousness and faintly grasped by them even in their
unconsciousness, grasped tenuously also by the narrator, who has gathered up
these unseen facts for them and for the reader to understand.

The third and final part of the book worked less well for
me, as threads are tied up and an attempt at a moral is inevitably found. Moody represents the ironic distance between
his characters’ lives and the literary or religious narratives available to
them, very simply, by describing those lives in naively heroic terms, and noting
the characters’ awareness that they really don’t measure up. He ends the book by trying to identify the
narrator himself as a mouthpiece, literally, for the God who knows what his
parents were up to, what happened at their parties, and what they felt about it
all, and somehow allowed him the same knowledge for a little while. He sets up a rather bald contrast between this
God and the Nature whose chaotic tide of disorder is about to overwhelm this
suburban family.

It’s surprising to realize that The Ice Storm appeared in 1994, just two years before Infinite Jest. Both novels are very similar, in some ways,
particularly the variety of literarily moralistic naivete possessed by their
narrators. It’s interesting to consider
that, where David Foster Wallace, according to his biographer,
felt uncomfortable at Amherst College because he hadn’t gone to an East Coast
prep school, Paul Hood, Moody’s protagonist in The Ice Storm, feels uncomfortable at his prep school because he
hadn’t gone to a private day school back home.
It’s also interesting to consider that Wallace’s noted struggles to find
a form can be seen to run orthogonal to Moody’s formal difficulties in The Ice Storm. Moody’s solution seems to have been to give
up nonstandard forms (though he still publishes short stories like one in Agni that
consists of names of cheese), where Wallace moved deeper into them.

It’s less surprising to learn that Moody went to college at
Brown University, where Jeffrey Eugenides and Jennifer Egan (another
recent novelist whose name escapes me) also graduated. It’s been noticed that
both Eugenides and Egan have recent novels out where characters are just
learning about French theory and poststructuralism. But one of the wonderful things about The Ice Storm is that Moody uses terms
form those theories, apparently, entirely unselfconsciously. His point of view characters, delightfully, often
understand their world literally in terms of structuralist literary theory, as
if this were the most natural thing in the world.

The Ice Storm is
well worth reading, and well worth thinking about. However, aside from unfortunately not so hard
to see issues with the portrayal of gender—the women are all mean or promise to
grow up into meanness, and it’s suggested that the protagonist’s life was
stunted by his female friends’ unjust failure to find him attractive, while
the men are all treated with perfect compassion—there’s a sense of
self-importance that a reader might justly find annoying. The book is trying to be both an example of
“grown-up” literature, like that of middle Updike, and an earnest, authentic
expression of its age (in both senses of that word). It can’t possibly succeed at both, and if it
fails at one, it risks being accounted a failure in toto, which isn’t fair.
It’s really a quite good book, and to pretend it’s transformed into a
failure because one perceives the narrator to have a certain amount of unexamined
privilege would be to deprive readers of something that really is special.